Peter J. Kalis
Chairman and Global Managing Partner of K&L Gates
Peter Kalis, Chairman and Global Managing Partner of K&L Gates, provides strategic advice to many of the nation’s largest corporations. In that capacity he has worked extensively with chief executive officers, boards of directors, and general counsel in the development and execution of proactive or defensive litigation strategies and strategies to preserve and access corporate insurance programs in response to a variety of novel and substantial claims. Mr. Kalis has also served as an arbitrator in arbitrations sited in the United Kingdom, Bermuda and the United States.
After law school, Mr. Kalis served as law clerk to the late J. Skelly Wright, Chief Judge of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and for the late Associate Justice Byron R. White of the US Supreme Court. The Lawyer — a leading U.K. legal industry publication — recently named Mr. Kalis as among the ten individuals in the global profession who will shape the international market for legal services in the next decade, and Law360 recently selected Mr. Kalis as one of the professions “Most Innovative Managing Partners.” He has been selected by his peers for inclusion in The World’s Leading Insurance and Reinsurance Lawyers, The Best Lawyers in America (Bet-the-Company Litigation, Business Litigation, Commercial Litigation, Environmental Law, and Insurance Law), and Law Dragon Magazine’s "500 Leading Lawyers in America" and "500 Leading Litigators in America." Mr. Kalis has also been included in Euromoney’s Legal Media Group Expert Guides – Best of the Best, in which his peers have identified him as one of the top 30 insurance and reinsurance lawyers in the world. He is on the Board of Advisors for Best Lawyers.
Mr. Kalis is a member of the American Law Institute. He has served on Task Forces of the American Bar Association, and routinely addresses professional congregations on both practice and law firm leadership topics.
He served as the ABA’s National Law Day Chair and served ex officio on the ABA’s Commission on Civic Education and Separation of Powers and the Standing Committee on Public Education.
He serves on the Board of Directors and Executive Committee of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development and chairs the organization's Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the Leadership Council on Legal Diversity, the West Virginia University Foundation, Inc. and its Audit Committee, and on the Board of Trustees of the Carnegie Museum of Art. He formerly served on the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors and chaired the Finance and Investment Committee of the Blanchette Rockefeller Neurosciences Institute. He is a past director of the Duquesne Club, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, The Children's Center of Pittsburgh, the Three Rivers Young Peoples Orchestras, the National Kidney Foundation of Western Pennsylvania and the National Pancreas Foundation.